The first impression a vistor has upon entering an exhibition of the work of Fred Charap is that of color--- resonant, sumptuous, almost palpable color (if the eye could touch, here it would reach out), condensed into greys and blacks, slipping into silvery whites. The duality that these paintings play upon is strikingly immediate: on the one hand, as abstraction they participate in the modernist tradition of the art object, autonomous and freed from its dependence upon representation; on the other, because of their luminescence, they refer back to an earlier painterly tradition, that of the “window on the world.”

In its classical form, this tradition combined distant landscapes on the walls of daily life, evoking distances in time as well---history painting and family portraiture --- as subjects fit for contemplation. Earlier, as religious icon and prehistoric fresco, it opened up windows which yearned toward the magical. In both cases, however, like all dream images, the window in painting signified a presence where there had been absence, a presence brought into being through human effort and art.

However, as we approach the pieces in the exhibition and look more closely, we become aware of a disquieting fact: the surfaces of Charap’s canvases are obviously and violently dismembered. There are cuts --- sometimes short and fine, elsewhere long and deep--- fissures,rips, and then strips of canvas, bandage-like, heavy patches, even glue. All of this contends forcibly with the color, testimony to other, more hidden sources of meaning which are made manifest as fragment, intervention, incompleteness, materiality. Here is the vocabulary of Arte Povera, familiar to us from the work of Burri, Tapies, and Fontana, but there is also a sense of the contemporary, of Performance Art, Body Art, piercing. The canvas has become the artist’s skin, the site of his exteriorized interior life and struggles.

Charap’s exhibition at Galleria Nova presents a selection of pieces from two different series.He himself calls the first series “pages” (in fact, they are for the most part oils on paper), indicating his focus on the Sign as writing and history. They are almost all diptychs, evincing a tense dualism in both color and structural surface: split into uneven halves, their massive central ligatures bind together the dissonances and absences---cuts for lines, a missing text.

In the second series, Charap acknowledges the influence of Color Field masters on his work (Mark Rothko is a preferred one), but once again, his own commentary is apparent in the scarred and perforated canvas. In fact, although we have read them as windows, histories and texts, both series demonstrate an intense, almost archeological strategy in their comprehension of world act and inner form.

But perhaps it is in his drawings, mocking and sardonic, that Charap best reveals the anatomy of his origins. Although he has spent the last fourteen years in Tuscany, Charap was born in Brooklyn into a family of emigrè Russian jews, and grew up in New York City in the turbulant years of Abstract Expressionism, Jazz and BeBop, the Beat Generation and the Cold War. His cityscapes are at the same time miracles of architectonic suspension and heaps of apocalyptic rubbish, full of tunnels and caverns that come up hard against blank walls, closed doors, walled-up windows. A similar diatectic conditions the inhabitants of this space: on the one hand, victims of urban violence, they endure an oblivion in which all human necessities---food, housing, love--- have become mere commodities. And yet, on ther hand, among them we see musicians and acrobats who seek each other in a fragmented world and who perform obstinately in the silence. Franz Kafka, another of Charap’s artistic mentors, wrote in a now famous letter: “Art must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” The moral imperative of Charap’s work, taken as a whole, demands an unblinking scrutiny of the Self as well as a testifying eye towards history. He asks us to combine this double vision in form, poetry and art.